So began my introduction to a year of living and working in rural France. When I saw the room where I would be staying, I was aghast. I was led up an old wooden staircase for two floors, along a narrow corridor, to a large empty room, off which stood another room, about 8ft. x 4ft., at the end of which was a French window with grey shutters, giving a beautiful view of green fields and the mountains in the distance.
I stared at this tiny room, which contained nothing except a narrow, single bed, a free-standing cupboard, a student table, and a student chair. The floor was covered in old, uneven, wooden floorboards. I soon worked out that a black metal cylinder, resembling the funnel of a steam engine, standing on the floor behind the door, must be some form of stove for heating the room. I had never seen anything like it, and certainly didn’t know how such a contraption worked.
There was no toilet, no means of cooking, nor even of boiling a kettle to make tea, not that I even had a kettle in the first place. I was surrounded by empty rooms, with ancient floorboards, culminating in my isolated room. In the bare room adjoining mine, however, I saw a stone sink, set into the wall in front of a window, with missing glass in one of its lower panes. I didn’t know at that stage that only cold water was available, though, and I discovered as the months went by that the water in both the taps and the sink would freeze all winter long, leaving about 4 inches of solid ice in that stone sink. There was no heating in the room and the wind whistled through the hole in the windowpane. Of course, I didn’t realize that Murat’s temperatures dropped dramatically in the winter, as snow and ice covered the region for almost 6 months. The water in that sink didn’t melt until the temperatures began to rise in the Spring and Summer.
I was shocked when I considered that this desolate-looking building was where I was going to live for a year.
Where was the bathroom, I asked the supervisors? Oh, that…come with us, and we’ll show you. So, I followed these two young ladies along those same empty corridors, up two more flights of equally well-worn stairs to another floor. On one side of this corridor were classrooms and on the other side was where the school’s three supervisors lived in their own individual, much larger rooms, one next to the other. At the near end of the corridor, just beyond the stairs, I watched as a supervisor opened a wooden door to what I would have assumed led to a broom closet, or a storeroom of some kind. I soon discovered that it wasn’t.
I stood there, probably with my mouth dropping open and my eyes widening in surprise. This was, in fact, the bathroom, to be used only by the supervisors and by me, too, who lived two floors down. It consisted of a tiny room, with wooden floorboards, just like the nearby corridor and the classrooms all around, but this room contained a small stone sink, and, on the floor, an old stone slab, on which were two slightly raised footpads, one on each side of a small hole, about 6 inches in diameter, disappearing downwards. This was the toilet?! How horrific could that be?! It took me no time to realize that I would be required to squat over that chasm going into the depths of who knew where.
